General Chat

lol!!



actually ........ I seem to remember that years and years ago you used to weigh breast fed babies (especially newborns) before and after feeding to make sure they were getting enough food.


Daughter informed me the other week that you don't do that now ................ you carefully watch the amount and kind of poo they put out ...................... ugggghhh!

Well, looks like that could be your job when you visit as a new grandma Sylvia!! lol

gee thanks! lol!!

Poor you!


The US always has to be different!!


and American and Canadian cook books are the only places where I have seen recipes calling for a cup of butter!


When I first saw that in a recipe I didn't know about filling the cup with water etc ............ so I filled the cup with butter.


Then had to try to get it out.


Later, I smeared the cup with a non-stick spray first. The butter came out more or less easily with that.

Finally, I heard about the water ........ but ahve flooded by kitchen counter on more than occasion!



sylvia

Wend. I hardly ever weigh butter and have never measured it in a cup. In this part of the world the packets used to be marked off in 20g markings. In the olden days Mum taught me to unwrap the 8 oz butter pack mark a corner to corner diagonal cross on the butter and where the two lines intersect in the middle, cut there. And voila you have two exact 4 oz portions. Bit hard to do in these days of plastic containers.

And no I have never filled a cup with water in order to measure butter!!!

However you can measure butter by cup. It just needs to be squishy and cut up a bit. And nooooooo please don't melt it, unless of course the recipe asks for one cup of melted butter.

By the way on melting chocolate. Do not allow any water to come in contact with chocolate while melting. You can melt over a double boiler or in the microwave but I think the rule is to melt first and add the other ingredients after.

Wend

I honestly don't know ................. I'm originally English, so I grew up with measuring and weighing, so cup measures were strange to me


One thought I've just had ..... and it is my own thought! ................... I wonder if the reason goes back to pioneer days over here?


The women would have had very few utensils to help with cooking, and would have had to make do.

Maybe scales for the kitchen would ahve been considered "unnecessary" when determining how much stuff you take on the ship, or on the wagon on a traipse across the ocean or the prairies. Things to do with work or farming would have taken priority.



sylvia

Janey

I have a Willow metric kitchen measure which I think Aunty Sherlock referred to,which is handy for converting measurements.
It's a cone shaped tin which sits on a stand to hold it upright.It has
grams and ounces,litres and mils,cups,pints etc.Apparently 4ounces
(ozs) or 125grams of say,cocoa is different from the same amount of grated cheese.They come up to different levels inside the container.
Anyway,one ounce=30grams.

I have a really easy and quick chocolate cake which is very nice,and can be frozen.It's not as rich as some of the other recipes either.It's always been a family favourite with us.

EASY 3 MINUTE CHOCOLATE CAKE

3ozs (90g)melted butter
6 ozs (180g) castor sugar (ordinary sugar is fine)
6 ozs (180g) self raising flour
half a cup of milk (1 cup=250ml)
2 tablespoons cocoa (1 Tbspn=20g)
2 eggs
half teaspoon vanilla essence ( half tspn.=2ml)

Put all ingredients into a large bowl and beat by hand for 3 minutes,or about 1 minute if using electric beaters,until well combined.
Bake in an 8inch (20cm) round tin at 350F (180C) for 35-40 minutes.

(My oven is fan-forced so I only use 160 degrees and reduce the time of cooking by 10 minutes as I find that fan-forced ovens are hotter.)

Turn out onto a rack and ice with chocolate icing when cool.

Enjoy!

(Hopefully I have all the measurements covered,so that everyone can understand them.)

Hey Margot. Guess what I am holding in my hand. Actually I have two of them. English and Metric Cooks Measure. Conical shaped with the ounces and grams written on the inside with all the different ingredients. Oh and lookee here it has English, metric and American.

1 English cup equals half an English pint or 284 ml. And one American cup equals half an American pint or 213 ml.

Actually my measures are so old their little plastic bottoms have disappeared and I have to be really careful when I fill them up because one bump and there's stuff everywhere.

Oh well these are probably far too technical for the Canadians. Which reminds me which size cup did Janey say she was using!!!?

I really hate to see people missing out on a challenge. So Janey, here you are. Muffy's chocolate cake converted from uninterpretable gibberish into an easy to understand recipe of scientific excellence. You will of course need to find a decent grocery store in order to purchase the sugars, but that is part of the challenge.

And when you are standing in your kitchen surrounded by dozens of dirty pots, an obscene looking mixture you know will never cook up into the delicacy imagined, and a floor covered in several unidentifiable substances.... you would do well to remember I am so very pleased to be living on the other side of the planet.

The ExtraOrdinarily Difficult Chocolate Cake - Canadian Version

Using the 8 fl oz cup (or 250 ml)


200g good quality dark chocolate , about 60% cocoa solids
Buy a 250gm block of good quality cooking chocolate and eat enough squares to reduce it to 200 g.

200g butter , cut in pieces
Take one 250g pat of butter (not margarine) and divide it into 50 gram lots and use 4 bits.

1 tbsp( or two dessert spoons or 4 teaspoons) instant coffee granules (instant coffee from the jar you grab before you wake up in the morning)

85g (3/4 of a cup, 1 cup equals 100 grams) self-raising flour (all purpose flour with baking powder added – go buy self raising flour or cake flour)

85g (3/4 of a cup) plain flour (all purpose flour)

1⁄4 tsp ( fill teaspoon with soda level it out divide in 4 use a quarter) bicarbonate of soda

200g (1 cup)light muscovado sugar
Muscovado is a type of unrefined brown sugar with a strong molasses flavor.Also known as "Barbados sugar" or "moist sugar", muscovado is very dark brown and slightly coarser and stickier than most brown sugars.

200g ( 3/4 cup) golden caster sugar
Caster (Superfine) sugar that is made from unrefined sugar. Has a light brown colour and a very subtle buttery toffee taste.

25g (1 teaspoon less than a quarter of a cup) cocoa powder brown chocolately stuff which is difficult to dissolve in cold milk or water

3 medium eggs (not too big, not too small)

75ml buttermilk (5 tbsp) Buttermilk used to be the milk left over after churning the butter. Buttermilk is now a commercial product made by adding a culture (usually lactic acid bacteria) to skim milk, causing it to sour and thicken. Buttermilk can be substituted by adding 2 tablespoons of lemon juice or vinegar (or 2 teaspoons of cream of tartar) to 1 cup of milk.

grated chocolate or curls, to decorate (use the potato peeler to shave the chocolate – if you haven’t eaten all the leftover bits.

Ganache

200g good-quality dark chocolate , as above (more left over chocolate to eat).
284ml carton double cream (pouring type) (bit more than 1 x 250 ml carton.)
2 tbsp golden caster sugar

I do of course hope you have the method of combining all of these ingredients. Hopefully the web site containing this info is still accessible???

Aunty Sherlock

My Willow measuring cone thingy is probably the same age as yours,but yours has had more use than mine.Mine still has it's bottom bit,lol

Between you people and the virus that will not leave ... I am going to go outside, walk down the sidewalk ("pavement" ... which prompts me to ask whether you people don't pave your roadbeds, and if you do, how you know that "pavement" refers to the part you walk on and not the part you drive on ...), go to the back yard ("garden" ... except it isn't, nothing grows there, growing is in the side yard ...), and bang my head repeatedly against the wall ("wall" -- do you have some other word for that now?).


Cynthia ... no, we do not measure babies by volume here. This would be because we generally want to know how much a particular baby weighs, and not because we are baking something that calls for "x" amount of BABY. Perhaps you do? ;)

But if we were doing that ... we would use the displacement method, just like for butter and lard and such like solids. Hahahaha. Fill a very large measuring thingy to the 3-quart level with cold water. Place baby in container, submerge baby completely, read the level the water rises to. Voilà. If you don't have enough baby, add some more. If you have too much, well, you'll have to solve that yourself.


Now, we don't always have to use the displacement method for butter. (Does nobody remember displacement from high school science lab??)

This is because, as I mentioned in passing, our butter comes in one-pound (now called 454-gram) oblongs covered in paper or foil --- and that paper or foil is conveniently and sensibly marked off in the volumes needed for cooking: 1/4 cup, 1/2 cup, 1 cup, etc. A pound of butter (or lard/shortening, which is also marked off this way) is 2 and 1/4 cup, if I recall correctly. You look at the line on the paper and you hack off the amount you need.

Butter does not come in plastic containers. That's margarine. And there is not much easier than putting 2 cups of cold water in a large measuring cup and adding margarine, or shortening or butter, if you've messed up your paper wrapper, until you have 2.5 cups, to give you 1/2 cup of margarine, or whatever the heck you need.


And it doesn't matter how much you try to persuade me that it is sensible, I am never ever ever going to start cooking by recipes that measure some ingredients by volume and some by weight! That is just, pardon my French, NUTS. I can tell how many cups of cooked lentils I'm looking at by eye - or by reading the volume scale (cups and quarts on one side, mls and litres on the other) etched on the inside of the Ikea saucepan I just cooked them in. That's how I plan to keep doing it. ;)


And now, woowoowendi. Well, if you really did make the brownie recipe, and if you really did get the results you describe, I can think of a few possible reasons.

Two are as you suggest.

First, perhaps you really are the world's worst baker. In that case, it might be impossible for someone else to guess where you went wrong.

Second, perhaps it was the convection oven. (That's the thing you call a fan oven there, I think. They are very uncommon here and I've been surprised at the number of people who seem to have them over there. Here, they're newfangled and expensive.) I have no experience on which to base a guess.

Third, perhaps you neglected to read through the thread and realize that the measurements I gave were in *North American* units, i.e. 8-ounce (by volume) cups, not the 10-ounce cups you use. So the ratio of 4 eggs to 8 ounces of flour that the recipe calls for is going to produce something quite different from the ratio of 4 eggs to 10 ounces of flour that you may have used.

Fourth, perhaps it really just isn't too clever to arbitrarily reduce one of the main ingredients of a recipe by half -- in this case, from 2 cups sugar to 1 cup sugar -- and expect the result to be as advertised. Hmm. I wonder how it would have turned out if you'd just eliminated the sugar altogether ...

Because if there's one thing that recipe does not make, it is a dry baked good. Nuh uh, nuh uh.


Anyhow. I'm going to keep on using recipes that measure all ingredients the same way: by volume.

And I'm going to give up on converting weights to volumes, I'm afraid. Nobody seems to agree on the method.

And Margot ... siiiiiiiigh ... you have given me a recipe with equivalents in imperial and metric -- but they are still *weight* and I don't care what system you weigh things in, you're still measuring by weight/with scales, and not by volume/with measuring cups! Eeeeee!

And I know very very well that 1 tbsp = 15 mls, not 30 mls as your notes say. That is one thing I really do know. So I'm starting to get the feeling that somebody is maybe trying to ... either poison me or drive me mad, here. ;)

One final word for AuntyS. It very much matters whether brown sugar, for instance - measured by volume - is packed or loose. Yeesh.

Foreigners. Just weeeeird, they are!

It truly is odd. I hadn't any idea we spoke so many strange and wonderful different languages when it comes to something as universal as cooking!

I thought I'd posted that yesterday but found I hadn't. Now I see AuntyS is still babbling.

Golden caster sugar. I am completely confident that no such thing is to be found on my local grocery shelves.

1/4 tsp -- I have this wonderful thing called a measuring spoon set. It has 1/4, 1/2 and 1 tsp, and 1 tbsp. Magic!

Whatever this "Willow" thing is, I don't need it or want it! My recipes will continue to call for, say, 1 cup flour, 1 cup grated cheese, 1 cup packed brown sugar, and I will use my nice uniform measuring cups. (Very very occasionally, for something like cheese that actually is sold in packages marked in weight, a recipe may say something like "4 oz cheese, grated" and I can deal wtih that.)

I still don't know what "double cream" is. 10% mf? 30% mf? Whipping cream, table cream ...?

There are no instant coffee granules in my house ...


But the main thing here may be -- I can't stand dark chocolate. ;)

Janey, it's said over here that we (ie people in UK and people in North America which I think includes Canadians lol) are divided by a common language, as well as a heck of a lot of water. LOL

I know TW! I watch enough Corrie and EastEnders to be reasonably well self-taught in a lot of the lingo. They just seem to have managed not to do much cooking.

What I need to do is spend some time seriously observing Jamie and the rest of them on the Food Channel, and see whether they're doing things in a foreign cooking language and we're being led wildly astray and no wonder things never work the way they do on TV!

I've got the answer!! Janey.....go to YouTube and google Delia Smith...........she is the goddess of cookery over here. If Delia recomments cinnamon sticks....they fly off the shelves. If she recommends a particular kitchen gadget, the makers can't produce them quickly enough. Go......have fun!

Janey, Aunty does not "babble". She informs, advises, lectures, suggests... where's my flamin' Thesaurus. Oh yes instructs, counsels, helps and tolerates.

In the making of the gnache I really don't believe it matters what cream you use as long as it is not the really thin runny stuff. It needs to be pure cream too not the stuff mixed with gelatine.

I thoroughly agree that packed brown sugar differs in volume from loose brown sugar.

And I need to continue this later botheration I have to go. Catcha ya.

Tsk, I *do* know who Delia Smith is. Tsk. We realy are far more cosmopolitan here in Canuckistan than in either of the U places - K or S.

So what's first up on her site?

http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes

http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/type-of-dish/party-food/petits-monts-blancs.html

Golden caster sugar!!! Eeeeeeeee!!

Okay, that's not a good test, because it's all made of cheesy stuff, and it's sold by fl oz (ml) so no translation problem there.

But look what I see!

http://www.deliaonline.com/home/conversion-tables.html

I just edited the brownie recipe in post 1, and Delia agrees with me:

1 stick butter (that's how yanks tend to buy it, 4 sticks in a pound) = 4oz = 110g

and she says

1 cup brown sugar = 6oz (weight not volume) = 175 g
1 cup granulated sugar = 8oz = 225 g
1 cup flour = 5oz = 150g
etc.

Ludicrous! Pointlessly complicated! I will swear by my 8-oz, 16-tbsp cups (which are also marked in metric mls btw) til I die and never will you convert me to all this weighing nonsense!

Oh, she also says:
If using a fan oven you will need to reduce the oven temperature in a recipe by 20 degrees.

so that answers that too.

Anyhow, back to her recipes ...

Watercress and potato soup
6oz (175g) watercress
1 large onion, roughly chopped
12 oz (350g) potatoes (weight after peeling), chopped small
¾ pint (425ml) vegetable stock (from Marigold bouillon powder)
½ pint (275ml) milk
1 oz (25g) butter, plus an extra teaspoon
the juice of ½ lemon
Salt and freshly milled black pepper

There we go. Weigh the watercress, weigh the potatoes, measure the milk, weigh (or eyeball) the butter ... nope, silliness. ;)


I actually do understand weighing something like potatoes. They're lumpy when cut, with air in between them, so what is a cup of potatoes? Whole, mashed, cubed ...?

Well, I measure 'em by the displacement method ..... hahaha. ;)

Where's the Chocolate in that lot???

>>>>> runs away very fast>>>>>>>>>>>

LOL and I thought that this thread was for cooking young girl guides!!!

well you learn summat everyday dont you? LOL

Nooooo!

Delia is not complicated in the least because I can understand her.....and I hate cooking!


...and....golden castor sugar is just a fine sugar which has a ....golden colour to it.


Yikes. Who would have thought that baking a cake could cause so much trauma???


I can feel a need for therapy coming on so will go and check my scales....lol